The iPhone may have the cool factor, but what if you actually need to… er, um… use it?
Which is better, the iPhone or the BlackBerry?
On Wednesday, Apple cut the price of its top-of-the-line iPhone from a wallet-breaking $599 to a less-terrifying $399. This price reduction comes as reports have emerged that July sales of the iPhone outnumbered those of all other smartphones combined. With my battered, aging BlackBerry on its last legs, I went back to the Apple store to try to join the crowd and sell myself on trading brands. But after a few hours of side-by-side comparisons, I’m convinced more than ever that the iPhone isn’t the device for me. I’ll be replacing my BlackBerry with … another BlackBerry.
The keyboard. The BlackBerry keyboard is an engineering wonder. I have a model with a full QWERTY keyboard rather than a downsized phone pad, and I can thumb-type my editor with one hand while hanging off the side of a San Francisco cable car with the other. iPhone’s virtual on-screen keyboard is a whole lot cooler, but it loses its luster as soon as you have to meet a deadline. After hours of practice—the trick is to tap the virtual keys lightly with your fingertips, rather than trying to press down—I still mistype my own name.
The iPhone does have two advantages I wish BlackBerry would catch up with. First, it’s a true multitasking computer.
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Aside from the obvious benefits of Visual Voicemail, it’s hard to conjure a scenario in which any of the iPhone’s gee-whiz features will help you get any work done. Multitouch is fun to play around with, and it’s neat to rotate the screen from portrait to landscape. I’m skeptical that either feature will ever help me meet a deadline. Apple hasn’t yet succeeded in turning its fetish object into a productivity tool, but BlackBerry’s maker, Research in Motion, has done the reverse. The company made its business tool into a fetish object by starting with functionality (check out the original model) and gradually growing into sexy shapes like the Pearl and the Curve.
Selling my iphone and going back to BB…
I am a big fan of apple products and love their innovative spirit and for the most part I’m very satisfied with their tech… However, the iPhone turned out to be a big disappointment, and today I bought an 8830 and ported my number back to Verizon… My two months with ATT and my iPhone were fun, but not as productive. If you’re thinking of getting an iPhone, here are some dealbreakers you might want to know about…
1. ATT service is awful compared to Verizon. I droped calls constantly.
2. ATT service is noisy. Every call, email or text is preceded with radio interference that can be heard through anything with a speaker.
3. The touch keyboard is cool, but not practical. Aside from not being able to touch type, the keys are small and hard to use. If it weren’t for the error correction/predictor feature, it would take forever to get out a simple email.
4. The visual voicemail is cool, but not reliable. Sometimes it would take over an hour for a voicemail to show up on the list.
5. The email notify feature is not reliable at all. I found myself checking my email constantly.
6. The phone crashed a lot. At least once a week I found myself doing a hard shut down and reboot. This would usually happen when I was getting a call waiting, which meant I would be essentially hanging up on two people, and I had to wait while the phone rebooted to call them both back.. You also burn minutes (which you are paying for) to apologize for the dropped call and regain your place in the conversation.
8. You always have to look at the phone. Probably the worst thing is that you have to always be staring at the thing to use it. There are exactly zero features that you can do without looking, except for answer the phone with bluetooth I guess.
9. No redial. No voice commands..
Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is a great idea, and in a few years i’m sure it will be great, but for now I’m crawling back to Verizon and my crackberry…If productivity is your thing, the iPhone is not for you.
The new iPhone 3G is a terrific product, with many great business features. That said, I still prefer the BlackBerry. Better email with or without exchange, better keyboard, better battery life and the ability to carry a spare battery and swap it out.
I’ve been using BlackBerry for 3 years, and just changed my carrier from T-mobile to Verizon with, you guessed, another BlackBerry.